Is Journalism Deserting our Public Bodies?

What happens to the democratic and public service role of journalism if it stops reporting on public bodies such as the courts?

The tone at the Friday session of the AJE’s end-of-year AGM, addressing Journalism and Public Service, echoed the edict that ‘justice must be seen to be done’ (for example…).

The Freedom of Information reporter Heather Brooke suggested that journalism (and journalism education) has a window of opportunity under the current coalition government, who came to power with a transparency agenda, to prioritise access to public bodies as essential to journalism’s future. Journalists needed to take advantage of this and make visible the need to extending FOI powers, for example to cover Network Rail and city academies.

But as Stewart Kirkpatrick of the Caledonian Mecury (also @CalMerc) said, journalism’s problem at the moment is economic.

David Holmes (University of Sheffield, or @spikefodder) highlighted how the press has reduced its coverage of court reporting in the last 20 years. Holmes charted the fall-off in court reporting across five paper in the Yorkshire region (Sheffield, Barnsley, Wakefield). There was a marked decline in court reporting, particularly in magistrates’ reporting, except in Barnsley. Holmes discussed Marcel Berlins, who wrote in the Guardian last December:

The demise of so many local and regional newspapers and the intense financial pressures, which have caused even the survivors to reduce drastically both staff and coverage, means that we knew far more about what was happening in our courts 50 or 20 years ago than we know today.

Holmes argued it was the journalist’s and the academic’s responsibility to chart this decline, understand it, and at least explain its implications. (Expect more research to follow.)

Paul Egglestone (UCLan, or @digitaldocs) hoped that the regional press could use its imagination when thinking how to support investigative reporting, drawing on clever models such as those offered by organisations such as ProPublica.org.

Egglestone discussed one of his projects, Outnumbered, run together with Newcastle University’s CultureLab, to explore hyperlocal’s response to the problem of reporting by hiring 20 citizen/vounteer journalists in a poor council estate in Preston, abandoned by the regional press. Specifically, the project is researching what type of content people want–and will pay for. But one of the stumbling blocks, suggested Egglestone, was that regional news bodies can’t make the most of this experiment, are relatively inflexible, and want to ‘own’ the patch, with all the professional snobbery towards such ‘indymedia’ that often comes with the territory.

Thinking about different types of ‘public bodies’, Barbara Mitra and Claire Wolfe (Worcester University) explored the question of the newsreader’s gender on the presentation and credibility of public service broadcasting, and that news programmes play a role, with television in general, in encouraging a very narrow view of femininity. Mitra and Wolfe drew on the words of ex-BBC presenter Anna Ford asking “where are the women in political reporting?” The first question they posed was: why are there no grey-haired women in news reporting as there are grey-haired men? And the second: what is it that audiences actually want from their presenters?

For all the researchers involved, expect papers to follow, or do get in touch via their institutions…

(c) Image Simon Gurr